Everlasting Read Free Page A

see such a pretty, innocent girl.” Marjorie took her younger daughter’s chin in her hand a moment and tilted Ann’s face so that Ann could see the affectionate approval in her mother’s eyes.
    Now Catherine hoped for one dreamy instant that Marjorie, having dismissed the others, would link arms with her in the smug, snug way Marjorie had of making one feel chosen, and the two of them would walk into the room, two beautiful Eliot women together.
    Marjorie bent close to Catherine and spoke directly into her face so that Catherine had to read her mother’s lips as much as hear her words.
    “Catherine,” Marjorie said, “what have you done to that dress? You look like a fool . Go to your room and stay there. I don’t want to see you again tonight.”
    Marjorie turned her back on Catherine then and swept regally back into the crowded room.
    Catherine stood for a moment, stupefied with shame. But no one else was looking at her. She turned and, with what dignity she had left, slowly walked back through the entrance hall, past the towering, glittering Christmas tree, and up the wide curving stairway, away from the party, to the solitary third floor.
    She shut herself in her room. Stunned, she sat on her bed, looking at her hands, waiting for her heart to stop thudding. It was lonely on the third floor, for even Miss Smith was down in the library. It was quiet, for the huge old house was well insulated by the thickness of its walls and floors; the party might have been a thousand miles away.
    She hugged herself; she tried to keep from crying, but the painful sobs broke forth, hurting her chest. It had happened again. It always happened. She should not have pretended she could change it. She did not belong here, she was wrong here, always wrong. Catherine wept, hating herself and her family and her life.
    She knew she had to escape, change, leave—but she didn’t know where to go, or how.
    If she didn’t belong with the family she had been born to, then where did she belong?
* * *
    The next day her father summoned her to the library. It was a little after noon, and the adults were just rising. Even Shelly, George, and Ann were still asleep. The Christmas night revelry had lasted late into the night, as had Catherine’s tears.
    This morning Catherine thought her father looked old and tired, but handsome as always. He had a Bloody Mary, his typical morning drink, in his hand. He sat on a leather chair near the fireplace, but there was no fire lit this morning, only dead ashes as deep as the grate. Perhaps the worst and most British quality about Everly was that some rooms were impossible to heat. Catherine, in wool slacks and sweater, shivered.
    “So, Pudding, sorry you couldn’t be with us last night,” her father said casually.
    Catherine shrugged. She and her brother and sister knew that their father loved their mother with a slavish devotion that would prevent him from ever crossing her in the smallest thing. He would not protect his children, if it meant defying his wife.
    “Your mother’s been a bit miffed with you lately, Cathy,” he went on. “This college thing, you know. You’re really going to have to do something.”
    Catherine stared at her father. Many times she had heard her mother say to her father that he had inherited all of his famous father’s charm and good looks but none of his intelligence or common sense, and Catherine knew her mother was right about this, as she was about so many other things. Now she knew that her father would have nothing helpful or surprising to say about the matter of her college applications—or rather, her lack of them. She was not planning to apply to college. In fact, she was not planning to go to college. If she didn’t go, she’d be the only Miss Brill’s girl in the history of that school not to attend college. The school guidance counselor and the headmistress were furious with Catherine.
    It was not from rebelliousness that Catherine was not looking at